Author: Digital Touchstone

It’s important to categorize transactions, but it takes time. If every day brings several dozen into QuickBooks Online, you can automate this process.

One of the cardinal rules of accounting is this: Go through your new transactions every day. If you wait until there are too many of them, you’re likely to give them short shrift. You may miss problems, just as you might skip categorizing some of them because it simply takes too long.

But correct categorization is essential. Your income taxes and reports will not be accurate if you fail to assign the right category to all of your transactions. QuickBooks Online makes this easy.

The site also provides a way for you to accelerate the process by automating it. It allows you to create Rules. That is, if a transaction contains a specific piece of information, a name or an amount, QuickBooks Online allows you to indicate how it should be categorized. This kind of automation will save you time and may even prevent errors – as long as you use it carefully. Here’s how it works.

Defining Your Rules

We’ll use an easy example to explain how QuickBooks Online’s Rules work. Let’s say your shipping costs have started to increase lately, and you want to make sure you’re seeing any UPS transactions that go above a specified dollar amount, and that they’re categorized accurately. Hover your mouse over Transactions in the toolbar and click on Banking (assuming you’re downloading your bank transactions). Select an account to work with by clicking on it, and make sure the For review bar is highlighted. 

Click on a transaction to open it. (If you’ve never explored what you can do with a downloaded transaction, study this box carefully while you’re there, and contact us with any questions.) On the bottom line, you’ll see a link labeled. Create a rule. Click on it, and a panel slides out from the right, as pictured below:

The upper half of the Create rule panel

This portion of the Create rule panel is fairly self-explanatory. Give your rule a descriptive name (we entered UPS 25 Plus) and indicate whether it should be applied to Money in or Money out. If you want to select a specific bank account or card, click the down arrow in the field to the right and select it. Otherwise, choose All bank accounts. Next, decide whether a transaction has to meet Any of the conditions you’re going to specify or All of them. In this case, we want All. 

Now you have to describe the conditions under which a transaction will be affected. We want transactions whose Description Contains The UPS Store. We also want to identify purchases from The UPS Store whose total is more than $25. So you’d click + Add a condition. In the row that opens, click the down arrow in the Description field and select Amount. Click the down arrow again in the next field and choose Is greater than. The final field in the row should contain 25.00.

You could keep adding conditions, but that’s all we need for this rule. You can click Test rule if you want to find out how many transactions in your For review list would meet your specifications.

Next, you want to Assign attributes to the transactions selected. Your options here are Transaction type, Category, Payee, Tags, Class, and Memo. The first two are required and the third is recommended. The last three are optional. If you want QuickBooks Online to automatically confirm transactions this rule applies to, click the Auto-confirm button so it’s showing green. If you choose this option, your matching transactions will be modified to meet your criteria and moved directly into the Categorized queue. You won’t see them in For review. So consider this carefully.

When you’re done here, click Save.

The lower half of the Create rule screen

Warning: QuickBooks Online allows you to create new categories directly from this window. But accurate categorization is so critical that we’d rather you schedule a session with us to go over your list of categories and make any modifications necessary.

To recap: Any expense over $25 that comes into your For review queue whose Description reads The UPS Store will be automatically categorized and moved into the Categorized queue.

QuickBooks Online’s Rules can save you time, but if they’re not created correctly, you may have errors in your company file without even knowing it. We recommend that you let us help you set these up from the start to avoid this. If you’re new to downloading transactions onto the site, you may also want to consult with us.

One way to keep your company’s cash flow positive is by sending email reminders to overdue customers. QuickBooks® Online can automate this. 

Most small businesses struggle with cash flow. How do you get customers to pay by the due date, or at least not long after? We’ve written about some of the possible solutions. Accept credit/debit cards and direct bank payments. Send statements regularly. Offer a discount for early payment if it makes financial sense for you.

QuickBooks Online offers another tool for accelerating incoming payments: automated reminders. If you set these up, you won’t have to spend so much time keeping up with past-due remittances. It’s easy to do, and you can personalize your messages. You can even do this manually if you come across an individual customer who needs a nudge.

What about reminders for yourself? QuickBooks Online doesn’t come with a to-do list that you can use to enter tasks that must be done. But there are still ways to tie a digital string around your finger so you don’t fall behind on your own critical chores.

If you feel like you’re being too intrusive by sending out payment reminders, think about how you feel when you receive one yourself. Often, a financial obligation has simply slipped your attention. You want to maintain a good working relationship with your vendors, so you might even welcome such an email or letter.

Setting Up the Automation

To get started, click the gear icon in the upper right corner. Under Your Company, click on Account and Settings. Click the Sales tab and scroll down to Reminders. Click the pencil icon way over to the right to open the options here, then click the on/off button next to Automatic invoice reminders to activate them. Click the down arrow next to Default email message for invoice reminders to open the template.

QuickBooks Online includes email templates for late payment reminders that you can edit.

If you’ve ever done a mail merge, this will look familiar to you. QuickBooks Online replaces the text in [brackets] with data from your company file. So it will prepare an email for every customer that is past due and replace the bracketed content with your own customer and company names and invoice numbers. Of course, you can choose not to personalize the emails, but it’s likely to be more effective if you do. Everything in the template can be edited, and you can check a box to have a copy sent to you.

Below this email template are three reminder-scheduling blocks. Click the button next to Reminder 1 to turn it on. You’ll see that you can set up a reminder to go out to customers either on the due date or a specified number of days (3, 7, 14, 30, or 90) before or after.  

QuickBooks Online checks the due dates for your invoices and will automatically send the email reminder out to everyone who meets the criteria. If a customer record has an email address in it, a reminder will be dispatched even if you didn’t send the original invoice through email.

You can schedule automatic invoice reminders to every customer who meets the criteria you’ve specified.

To set up additional, different reminders, you can do so in the Reminder 2 and Reminder 3 blocks. When you’ve finished, click Save. You can always go back in and edit these. To see who received reminders, click on Sales in the left vertical toolbar, then Invoices. The word Reminded should appear in the Status column.

If you’d rather dispatch reminder emails manually, you can do so in QuickBooks Online. With the same Sales | Invoices screen open, click on the down arrow next to Receive payment at the end of the row and select Send reminder. If you want to send reminders to multiple customers, click the box in front of each name to create a checkmark. Click the down arrow next to Batch actions right above the table and select Send reminder.

Reminding Yourself

We wish that QuickBooks Online had a reminder feature like QuickBooks Desktop does, that greets you every time you launch the software and displays tasks that need to be done. But there are still ways to remind yourself that invoice and bill payments are running late. You just have to make a habit of checking certain data screens regularly. For example, you should be visiting:

• The Business Overview element of the home page. There’s an Income graph that shows you how much money is tied up in overdue invoices (and open invoices).
• The Invoices and All Sales screens that you can see by clicking on Sales in the left vertical toolbar.
• Reports, like Accounts receivable aging detail, Open Invoices, Unbilled charges, and Unbilled time.

If you just started using QuickBooks Online this year and are struggling with it, we’re available to set up training sessions and answer questions. And, of course, we’re always here for longtime users, too. The COVID-19 pandemic is still affecting a lot of small businesses, and we understand you may be facing difficult issues. If we can help you better use QuickBooks Online to manage your finances, please contact us.

Are you finding that you need more flexibility in an area of QuickBooks Online? Maybe it’s time to try an integrated app.

When you first started using QuickBooks Online, you probably found that it supplied the tools you needed to manage your accounting – and then some. But if your business has grown or become more complex, you may need more functionality and flexibility in one or more areas, like time tracking and billing.

There are hundreds of add-on applications that integrate well with QuickBooks Online in the QuickBooks Apps store, which you can find here. Many of these apps are free, but most have subscription fees. They’re designed to amplify the power of QuickBooks Online’s own features. The site will remain your home base, but you’ll have to learn enough about the add-on apps to understand how they work and how they integrate with QuickBooks Online.

Here are some of the most popular add-on solutions from the QuickBooks Apps site.

Expensify

QuickBooks Online allows you to record expenses. Its thorough form templates ask you for numerous details, like the vendor, product or service, amount, and billable status. Completed expenses appear in a table. You can run any of several related reports, like Expenses by Vendor Summary. If you use the QuickBooks Online mobile app, you can snap photos of receipts that are turned into expense forms by QuickBooks Online and partially completed with the receipt data.

Using the QuickBooks Online mobile app, you can snap photos of receipts and complete the expense forms provided.

But Expensify ($5-9 per month for one user) does more. It’s a robust expense management system that handles everything from receipt processing to next-day reimbursement. Where QuickBooks Online only supports basic expense tracking, Expensify allows you to create expense reports and follow them through multi-level approvals. It features automatic credit card reconciliation and expense policy enforcement, as well as bill pay and invoices/payments. Two-way synchronization with QuickBooks Online means you can work in either application and your data will be replicated in the other, as is the case with all of these integrated solutions.

QuickBooks Time

Formerly known as TSheets, this powerful time-tracking application builds on QuickBooks Online’s time management and payroll features. QuickBooks Time ($8-10 per user per month plus $20-40 monthly base fee) is now owned by Intuit, so it’s embedded directly in QuickBooks Online. 

Your employees can track their hours on any device, from any location, and they will instantly be available in QuickBooks Online so managers can review, edit, and approve timesheets. That data can then be used in areas like invoicing, job costing, and payroll. Advanced features include scheduling capabilities, overtime monitoring, GPS tracking, and real-time reports. The Who’s Working window shows you where your staff members are working and what they’re doing, in real time. 

Method:CRM

QuickBooks Online does a good job of helping you create profiles of customers and storing them for quick retrieval. But some businesses need more than that. They need true Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Method:CRM ($28-49 per month per user; discounts for annual subscriptions) is an excellent partner for QuickBooks Online in this area.

You can record and store customer details in QuickBooks Online, but Method:CRM adds true Customer Relationship management to the site.

When you integrate Method:CRM with QuickBooks Online, you no longer have to do duplicate data entry to keep track of your customers and their sales profiles and histories. You get a shared lead list and activity tracking (emails and phone calls), and your customer records contain the information a sales team needs, like customer details, interaction, transactions, and services performed. Leads are stored in Method:CRM until they’re customers, and you can track sales opportunities from a customer’s initial interest through the final sale. 

Two More Advanced Integrated Apps

QuickBooks Online provides basic inventory-tracking capabilities, but if your business has more complex needs, an integrated application like SOS Inventory ($49.95-149.95 per user per month) should be able to meet them. Built for QuickBooks Online from the ground up, the application offers advanced features like sales orders and order management, assemblies, serial inventory, and multiple locations. And if you need more sophisticated bill pay, invoicing, and payment processing (with multiple automated approval levels) than QuickBooks Online offers, you might look into the highly-regarded Bill.com ($39-69 per user per month).

Growth Is Good, But Challenging

We wanted to introduce you to a few of the hundreds of integrated apps available for QuickBooks Online because you should know that there are options for expanding on the site’s built-in capabilities. As your business grows, so does your need for more sophisticated accounting. QuickBooks Online may still be able to serve you well with the help of one or more of these add-ons.

You may also want to explore the possibility of upgrading your version of QuickBooks Online. We encourage you to consult with us if you’re outgrowing QuickBooks Online. We can help you explore the options so you can spend your time planning for your company’s future instead of wrestling with your accounting application.

The money you spend to run your business must be recorded conscientiously for your taxes and reports. Here’s how to do it.

You undoubtedly keep a very close watch on the money coming into your business. You record payments as soon as they come in and deposit them in your company’s bank account. But are you as careful about your purchases?

It’s easy to go out to lunch with a client and forget to save the receipt. You figure it’s not that much money, anyway. Or you pick up a ream of printing paper and a cartridge at the office supply store and neglect to record the purchase. When you disregard even small expenses, you can have two problems. One, your books won’t be accurate. And two, you never know how an extra $42.21 under Meals and Entertainment might affect your income taxes.

QuickBooks Online provides two ways to enter expenses. You can create a record on the site itself. Or you can snap a photo with your phone using the QuickBooks Online mobile app to document the money spent. Here’s how these two methods work.

Documenting At Your Desk

Let’s say you just had lunch with a vendor to discuss some products you’re planning to buy for a project you’re doing for a customer. You charged it to your company credit card, which you track in QuickBooks Online. You still have to enter it as an expense on the site so that when your credit card statement comes, you can match the credit card transaction to the expense you recorded.

Hover over Expenses in the navigation toolbar and click on Expenses. Click the down arrow in the New transaction button and select Expense. Fill in the fields at the top of the screen with details like Payee, Payment date, and any Tags you want to specify. Under Category details, select the correct category from the drop-down list and enter a Description and Amount. 

QuickBooks Online allows you to thoroughly document expenses. You can attach a picture of a receipt if you’d like.

Since you’re going to bill this to the customer as a part of your project fee, click in the Billable box to create a checkmark. Select the Customer/Project. Add a Memo to remind yourself of the reason for the lunch (very important!) and attach a photo of the receipt if you take one. Click Save. Your record of the lunch will now appear on the Expense Transactions screen. It will also show up in the Expenses by Vendor Summary and Unbilled Charges reports, among others.

Recording on the Road

In the example we just went through, attaching a photo of the receipt was the last thing we did to record an expense in QuickBooks Online. There’s another way to document a purchase that starts with a photo of a receipt and should save you a bit of data entry: using the QuickBooks Online mobile app. The app uses Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to “read” the receipt and transfer some of its data to fields on an expense record. 

(If you haven’t installed the QBO app on your smartphone, you should. You can do a lot of your accounting work that synchronizes automatically with QBO. It’s free, too.)

Open the app and log in. On the opening screen, you’ll see an icon labeled Snap Receipt. Click on it, and your phone’s camera will open (you’ll be asked for permission to use it). Position your phone over the receipt and move it around until you see the blue box covering the content of the receipt.  Take the picture. You’ll see it displayed on the phone with a message saying, “Use this photo.” If it seems OK, click the link. 

A message on the screen will tell you that the upload is complete and that the app is extracting the information from it. Click “Got it!” It should only take about a minute for your receipt to appear in the list on the Receipt snap screen. You’ll see the details that the app has pulled from your receipt. Tap the matching expense and click Done on the next screen.

You can snap a photo of the receipt in the QuickBooks Online mobile app, and some fields will be automatically entered on a receipt form in QBO.

When you’re back at your computer, open QuickBooks Online and go to Transactions | Receipts. At the end of the row that contains your receipt, click the down arrow next to Delete and select Review. QBO will display the partially-completed receipt form next to the photo you took of the receipt. Fill in any missing fields and save the transaction. Click Create expense on the screen that opens. Then open the Expenses menu and select Expenses, and there should be an entry for the receipt you just added.

This tool isn’t perfect, of course. Every receipt has different fields in different places, and sometimes they’re just not very readable. But in our tests, the app picked up an average of four fields.

Documenting your expenses using one of these two methods is so important. It will help you remember why you stored the receipt and make your reports more accurate. As long as you’re categorizing each transaction correctly, it will also make your tax preparation easier and faster and ensure that you’re charging customers for billable expenses. And if you’re ever audited, your careful work will come in handy.

QuickBooks Online does expense management well, but there are enough moving parts in these recording tools that you may have some questions. We’re here, as always, to answer them.

There are always more things to learn about the applications we use every day. Here are some tips for expanding your use of QuickBooks Online. 

We tend to fall into the same old patterns once we’ve learned how to make a computer application work for us. We learn the features we need and rarely venture beyond those unless we find we need the software or website to do more. 

QuickBooks Online is no exception. It makes its capabilities known through an understandable system of menus and icons, labeled columns and fields, and links. But do we really see what else it can do? Expanding your knowledge about what QuickBooks Online can do may help you shave some time off your accounting tasks and better manage the forms, transactions, and reports that you work with every day. Here are some tips.

Edit lines in transactions. Have you ever been almost done with a transaction and realize you need to make some changes farther up in the list of line items? Don’t delete the transaction and start over. QuickBooks Online comes with simple editing tools, including:

• Delete a line. Click the trash can icon to the right of the line. 
• Reorder lines. Click the icon to the left of the line, hold it, and guide it to the new position. This is tricky. You may have to work with it a bit.
• Clear all lines and Add lines. Click the buttons below your line items, to the left.

Click the More link at the bottom of a saved transaction to see what your options are.

Explore the More menu. Saved transactions in QuickBooks Online have a link at the bottom of the screen labeled More, as pictured above. Click it, and you can Copy the transaction or Void or Delete it. You can also view the Transaction journal, which displays the behind-the-scenes accounting work, and see an Audit history, which lists any actions taken on the transaction. 

Create new tabs. Do you ever wish you could display more than one screen simultaneously so you can flip back and forth between them? You can. Right click on any link in QuickBooks Online, like Sales | Customers,  and select Open link in new tab. 

Use keyboard shortcuts. Not everyone is a fan of these, mostly because they can’t remember them. Hold down these three keys together to see a list: Ctrl+Alt+?. Some common ones include those for invoices (Ctrl+Alt+i) and for expenses (Ctrl+Alt+x).

Modify your sales forms. Do you need more flexibility than what’s offered in your sales forms? It may be there. Click the gear icon in the upper right and select Account and settings under Your Company. Click the Sales tab. In the section labeled Sales form content, notice that you can add fields for Shipping, Discounts, and Deposits by clicking on their on/off switches. You can also add Custom fields and Custom transaction numbers.

Add attachments. Sometimes it’s helpful to have a copy of a source document when you enter a transaction. To attach a receipt to an expense, for example, look in the lower left corner of the transaction. Click Attachments and browse your system folders to find the file, then double click on it.

Record expenses made with credit cards. Who doesn’t use credit cards for expenses sometimes? You can track these purchases in QuickBooks Online, as pictured above. Click the gear icon in the upper right and select Chart of Accounts under Your Company, then click New in the upper right. Select Credit Card from the drop-down list under Account Type. Enter Owner Purchase in the Name field and then Save and Close. When you create an expense, select Owner Purchase as the Payment account. 

Previous Transaction Button. Are you trying to find a transaction that you entered recently but don’t want to do a full-on search? With a transaction of the same type open, click the clock icon in the top left corner. A list of Recent Expenses will drop down. Click on the one you want.

Whether you’re new to QuickBooks Online or you’ve been using it for years, there’s always more to explore. We’d be happy to help you expand your use of QuickBooks Online by introducing you to new features, building on what you’re already doing on the site to improve your overall financial management. Call us to schedule some time.